Infinite Jest • 20th Anniversary Cover Design

Little, Brown and Company held a competition to redesign the cover of Infinite Jest to celebrate the 20th anniversary edition. There was no way The Made Shop wasn’t going to get in on that.
We called our design “THE YUSHITYU MIMETIC RESOLUTION CARTRIDGE”
If you haven’t read it yet, inside the story there is an actual film cartridge called ‘Infinite Jest’ that functions as a sort of “MacGuffin” around which all the stories unfold. It’s a piece of media so completely entertaining that it’s lethal — once you start watching it all you want to do is continue forever neglecting everything else.
Now 20 years later, the novel ‘Infinite Jest’ itself has ironically achieved an oddly similar sort of iconic cultural aura — as a novel, but also as a physical media object itself.
Our cover design makes physical the double-meaning of the title by literally tranforming the book itself into Wallace’s “Mimetic Resolution Cartridge” with the title hand-scrawled as if by the filmmaker James Incandenza himself. And then, of course, the media-tape winds itself into an infinite loop within the case — echoed as the infinity symbol on the back cover.